An epistolary detective novel spanning Seattle to the South Pole, Where'd You Go, Bernadette traces 15-year-old Bee's search for her mother, Bernadette. Inventively told through reams of emails, transcripts, school reports and FBI files, interspersed with Bee's deadpan narrative, the hunt is so funny in parts that the reader almost forgets how terrifying the events taking place are.

Tucked away in her Airstream trailer at the back of a decrepit Seattle mansion, Bernadette Fox sees herself as a failed architectural genius. Anxious, agoraphobic and increasingly reliant on a virtual personal assistant in Delhi, she is feared by the hands-on mothers at her daughter's liberal school as a dangerous outsider. Her husband, Elgie Branch, a feted star at Microsoft Research, is hard at work on a robotic virtual assistant of Microsoft's own. When Bee gets perfect grades at school, her parents agree to a family holiday in Antarctica. But the day before the trip, Bernadette disappears. Bee's challenge is not only to discover where her mother has gone, but also to unearth where and what she has been before.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette is constructed from a collection of self-absorbed perspectives, and Maria Semple ensures each expertly pitched voice is both target and author of its own satire. In what is at times a sad and painful tale about family dysfunction, black comedy waylays sentimentality. Semple's second novel is a witty, thrilling adventure about creation, destruction, the Antarctic – and the maternal bond.